by Girl A
Judge Clifton listened to all their submissions, but said he was satisfied that none of the jurors had been at fault, either deliberately or accidentally. The tweet had first appeared on the ‘Infidels of Britain’ website, at a time when the jury were in a room where all electronic equipment, including their mobiles, was banned. So he decided the jury should be left to carry on with the rest of their deliberations.
The barristers were furious. ‘It’s not right,’ said one. ‘These men may be guilty, but they’re entitled to a fair trial – and this isn’t fair. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.’
Daddy must have worked out that he was one of the ones the jury thought was guilty. He wasn’t stupid, after all. The next time the jurors came in, he seized the moment, shouting: ‘I don’t want this biased jury. You are a biased judge. You are a racist bastard. You bastard!’
The security guards grabbed him, pushed his arms to his sides and forced him out of the dock and towards the cells. Billy decided he’d had enough, too. He shouted something about a BNP jury and walked out of the dock without needing to be restrained.
* * *
The jury finally came back with all their verdicts – all of them unanimous – on 8 May.
But while Daddy and the others stood in the dock at Liverpool Crown Court, sweating, fidgeting, not knowing where to look, I was at the park with Chloe.
She was on the swings, giggling, the comfort blanket she’d once so desperately needed just resting on the buggy nearby – now back to being just an accessory, something more for warmth than for comfort.
When my phone rang, a sixth sense told me what the call would be about. I had to fumble in my pocket for it, nearly cutting the caller off, but just managing not to.
It was Susan. From the moment she said ‘Hi’, I could tell she was smiling. And then I could hear the excitement in her voice as she rushed on: ‘They’ve all been found guilty, Hannah. All the ones involved with you have been convicted. Daddy, Tariq, Billy – all of them.’
She went on to say that a couple of the defendants had been cleared, but I wasn’t taking it in.
Guilty!
I was shocked and elated at the same time. In some dark corner of my mind, I’d still been so worried that they’d get away with it. I just hadn’t counted on this: that after nearly four years of doubt and betrayal, a jury of ordinary people had seen through the gang’s lies and recognised that I was telling the truth. The heartache, the pain; the terrifying, degrading memories would never go away – they were branded onto my soul. But at least now I had justice. They’d thought they were above the law, unstoppable, free to pick up kids like me as if they were pieces of meat on a butcher’s slab. And all the time they were doing it, in all those back streets and dark country lanes, the rest of the world had been looking away.
I’d never even caught a glimpse of them, but I knew that those twelve ordinary, wonderful people in the Liverpool jury had done what so many others hadn’t done in the past: they’d believed me. And in doing that, they’d set me free.
At the age of nineteen, having been raped so many times I couldn’t even begin to count them, I had my life back.
Daddy and Tariq, and Billy and Saj, all of them, were going to be sentenced the next day, and from then on they’d never be able to get to me again. I’d be free.
Until this perfect moment, I’d convinced myself that they’d somehow find a way to get out of it, or that the jury would decide that the other girls and I were lying.
I suppose I’d tried to steel myself for that. I’d imagined them all smiling as they were cleared, and then smirking as they walked out of the dock, slapping each other on the back, out into the lifts with their solicitors, and down to the revolving door and away past the lines of police officers.
But no, each and every one of the men who’d attacked me left the court complex that day in handcuffs, knowing their days as paedophile abusers and traffickers were over, and that they’d know in the morning just how many years they’d be spending behind bars.
* * *
All the men who’d attacked me had seen me distraught and in tears often enough, but even though a part of me would have liked to have seen them sentenced, I knew I couldn’t have faced it. I’d seen enough of them in the months they’d controlled me, pawing at me on their cheap, dirty beds or on the floors of empty houses.
So, to keep myself busy the next day, I caught the bus into Heywood and went shopping in Morrison’s, crossing the road by the Balti House with its angel clock and heading past the spot where Daddy had forced me into his car those four years ago.
My dad had said he’d pick me up after I had finished, and so I was outside, waiting for him, near where the taxis park, with Chloe sitting on the wall, eating chocolate. There was a line of cabs there that day and it was there that I heard one of the drivers say to the woman he was picking up: ‘Have you heard about them from Heywood? One of them got nineteen years.’
Nineteen years.
That was all I heard before the driver shut the door on his fare, got behind the wheel and drove away past the petrol pumps.
Nineteen years.
I assumed it was Daddy, but I wasn’t sure. Nineteen years. I’d never imagined any of them would get that long. I thought it would be five years max. I stood there in the car park, three bags of shopping in front of me, fighting back tears.
A few moments later my phone rang, and it was Susan. ‘Hi, Hannah,’ she said. I asked her if it was true, and if it was Daddy who’d got the nineteen years. ‘Yes,’ she said, and then she went through the session with me.
The judge had called my fifty-nine-year-old rapist by a name I’d never heard before – Shabir Ahmed – and told him he was ‘an unpleasant and hypocritical bully’. He made a point of saying he’d given me to Immy as a birthday ‘treat’.
Six of the gang became the first in Britain to be convicted of sex trafficking – Daddy, Tariq, Saj, Billy, Cassie and Hammy. All of them had their real names read out, but until I read them in the papers the next day I’d only ever known them by the nicknames they’d used to stay safe.
Daddy, or Shabir Ahmed, was given nineteen years for rape, trafficking and conspiracy to have sex with a child. The child, of course, was me.
The jury also convicted him of carrying out a sexual assault on the girl called Shauna at around the same time he was telling me how beautiful I was and how he’d given me a treat.
He didn’t know it then, but by the end of the year he’d have another three years to serve – for all his attacks on Lanika.
Tariq, real name Abdul Aziz, aged forty-one and married with three children, was cleared of two counts of rape involving Leah but got nine years for both conspiracy and trafficking me and all the other girls in his empire.
Saj, or Mohammed Sajid, thirty-five, got twelve years for trafficking, conspiracy and having sex with Alicia when she was thirteen. Once he’s served his sentence, it looks as though he’ll be heading back to Pakistan – there’s a deportation order waiting for him at the prison gates.
Billy, or Adil Khan, forty-two, married with a child, claimed he’d only ever met up with his mates to play cards or watch cricket. He denied even knowing Roxanne, let alone getting her pregnant when she was thirteen. ‘How could I get her pregnant if I never saw her before?’ he told the police. Forensic tests on her aborted foetus had proved otherwise. He got eight years.
Cassie, or Abdul Rauf, forty-three, who’d always wanted to kiss me, turned out to be something special. When he wasn’t driving a taxi, often for the gang, he was giving up his spare time to teach religious studies at his local mosque. He liked to wave goodbye to his wife and five kids in the mornings, before collecting Emma and me and taking us to Ashworth Valley for perverted sex. I heard he’d be on the school run later on the same days. Despite this, he only affirmed in the witness box rather than swearing on the Koran. He got six years.
Hammy, or Hamid Safi, twenty-two, wasn’t involved with me. But it turned out he’d
only recently sneaked into Britain from Afghanistan when he’d started trafficking some of the other girls. He’ll be deported, too, once he’s served his four-year sentence.
Those were the traffickers, but there were others in the dock, all still waiting to be sent down.
Immy, or Kabeer Hassan, twenty-five, received nine years for slipping away from the Balti House counter for his ‘treat’ with me. He got that long a sentence because not only was it rape, but it was also what they call ‘a joint enterprise’ with Ahmed.
Car Zero, or Mohammed Amin, forty-five, loved to drink but had miraculously turned teetotal by the time he got to court. He was given five years for conspiracy and a sexual assault on Leah.
Tiger, or Abdul Qayyum, forty-four, a ‘pillar of the Rochdale Pakistani community’, got the same for his part in the conspiracy.
Oh, and Harry, my white ‘father figure’ abuser? He went on trial a few months later and got four years.
By the time Dad pulled up ten minutes later, my tears had dried and I had a huge smile on my face. Chloe was still eating her Galaxy bar as I strapped her in.
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘He got nineteen years! Daddy got nineteen years!’
Then I was crying again, and Dad started punching the steering wheel like a man demented.
As we headed towards home, he held out his left hand towards me. I gripped it and he squeezed back.
I didn’t need to look up to know he was crying, too.
Epilogue
On the estates I know the teenagers are so broke they’ll save up a fiver over the week from their dinner money, then go out on Friday, buy a bottle of cider and ten fags, and walk the streets with them. They might buy a kebab or chips or whatever and then get a taxi home with their mates.
That’s it. No cinema, no Caffè Neros, no Nando’s afterwards. Just a walk around the streets and a few cigarettes on a park bench. Then another week of poverty to get through.
If there’s a breakdown in white communities, it’s on estates like mine – and the hundreds and hundreds of others just like it up and down the country – where most people are on benefits and parents don’t have any spare money to give their kids.
My dad says now that Daddy and his kind are predators, hunters, and if you’re hunting for lion you’ll go to Africa, where you know they are. And so these people don’t go hunting in Cheltenham or Guildford or Bath. They go hunting on council estates and all the rough areas, where kids are poor. Society’s changed, and it’s made their hunting ground wider. Poverty doesn’t help, nor the recession, and with the youth clubs either closed or closing, these people are giving young girls some of the things they don’t get otherwise: food, ‘friendship’, gifts.
They’ve watched girls like me coming out of school in the daytime or walking the streets with alcohol in our Lucozade bottles at night, getting drunk, using the local taxis, going into the kebab shops. And they’ve seen that we’re vulnerable. We just happen to be white, or mostly.
They’ll talk to us at first and they’ll sound like fun. We’ll act like idiots and have a laugh and they’ll laugh with us, or so we’ll think. Then it’s, ‘Have some more of this, have some more of that.’ At the time you think it’s you taking advantage of them, but it’s not. That’s how they do it. That’s how they get you. That’s how they hunt you down.
After the trial, all hell broke loose, pretty much. Some people saw it as a group of white girls being used and abused by a gang – maybe two gangs – of mostly middle-aged Pakistani men. And they could see that, despite some people trying to sweep it under any carpet they could find, it had been going on for years.
Others couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it. They could only see the sort of political correctness that said, ‘No, that can’t be happening. It would be awful, wouldn’t it? And how could we explain it? And wouldn’t it all be ammunition for the far-right?’
It was the kind of thinking that had left me, and the generations before me, to the ‘lifestyle decisions’ we’d supposedly made. In doing that they’d condemned us.
Rochdale Council claimed not to have known, or at least not to have understood, what was going on. They’ve been on a ‘journey’, they said, as if they’d signed up for some kind of fancy self-awareness course and everyone was supposed to say, ‘Well done, that’s nice. We hope you’ve learned a few things.’
But they did know, or they should have done.
I was still safely by the sea, with my bike and my Barbie dolls, at the time Shannon started to be abused in 2002.
She had walked along some of the same streets that I’d come to know, and been driven along them as well, just like me, terrified, sometimes drunk, sometimes drugged by men who were just the same as Daddy, Tariq and the rest of my abusers.
It was all documented, sitting in files that had done nothing more than gather dust by the time I came onto the scene six years later – the latest girl to find herself on the conveyor belt of grooming and abuse.
When things eventually got tough for both the police and Social Services, they’d claim that grooming like this wasn’t fully understood then. They knew about it, of course, but just dismissed it as girls like me going off the rails and making what became their new buzz word: ‘lifestyle choices’. No, they said, they didn’t understand it. Even though they had files full of evidence that told them exactly what sort of behaviour was going on in their town and how they could have moved in to stop it, and rescue at least some of the girls like me.
Shannon had lived in Rochdale and was regularly picked up by taxis on streets within sight of the town hall. So were other girls she knew. They were all the same sorts of ages: thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. All of them vulnerable; all chaotic and somehow going off the rails. Just like me, a few years down the line, they would end up some nights in sordid flats and houses where the men, almost all of them Asian, would use them for easy sex.
The police call it a modus operandi – an established way of doing something – and it was always exactly the same. It hadn’t changed over the years, not even down to the vodka they’d use to get us all drunk. It was just that in 2008 we were the new intake; we just had different names.
Crisis Intervention knew about it, and they’d been telling both the police and Rochdale Social Services for years.
They all knew that in August 2005 Shannon had been kidnapped, raped and left on the moors above her home town. Police did investigate, and they got as far as arresting two men, both of them Asian. But it never came to court because she withdrew her complaint.
It’s no wonder Jane and her boss, Sara, were frustrated and, no doubt, angry. Two and a half years before Daddy started raping me, Crisis Intervention had sent out another letter, another referral, marked ‘To Whom It May Concern’.
In it, Sara had written:
‘On 15th Feb ’06 Shannon presented to the Crisis team office at 8.30 a.m. in a distressed state stating that she had been taken to a hotel the previous evening by a nineteen-year-old man and his friends.
‘She had been given a substantial amount of alcohol and couldn’t remember who or how many people had had sex with her.
‘Shannon had lovebites on her neck and back, was dressed in a sari and was complaining of lower abdominal pain. Her outfit was soiled, she smelt and was very hungry. She said she had left the hotel in the early hours and walked back to Rochdale.’
In the same letter – copies of which went to both Greater Manchester Police and Rochdale Social Services – she said:
‘I believe from discussion and on-going involvement with Shannon that she is being sexually exploited by a significant number of adult men.
‘I also believe that much of Shannon’s sexual activity is non-consenting and done under duress and threat of violence. I also believe that Shannon is being given substantial amounts of drugs and alcohol in order to further impair her judgement.’
Not even this letter told the whole story. An official document Sara had received earlier the same day – something they
call an ‘outline of concern’ – talked about Shannon having sex with specifically ‘Asian men’.
It said the abdominal pain had been so bad she’d had to go to the local accident and emergency department. But she was never given any treatment.
‘She was escorted away by three Asian men before she was seen,’ said the report. ‘She is now missing.’ Police had been informed and were ‘concerned’.
The document moved on to an incident two days earlier, 14 February. Valentine’s Day, of all days. Again it said she’d been wearing a sari, but this time referred specifically to her being ‘carried across the road by three Asian men’.
She was ‘obviously under the influence of some substance’ and ‘had no memory of what had happened at the hotel’.
It turned out that Shannon’s mum had asked Social Services to put her under a child protection order because she couldn’t cope. It didn’t happen. Eventually, Shannon became pregnant by one of her abusers. She lost the baby. Given what she’d been through, I’m guessing that was a good thing.
If Social Services had been on a ‘journey’, it wasn’t the same one I’d been on. Nor Leah, Roxanne, Alicia, Paige, Courtney, Nadine, and all the others they’re still either investigating or who never came forward.
What we went through was real. Not packaged, not dressed up, not made to fit someone’s politics or agenda. We didn’t care about things like that. We just wanted to be rescued.
It’s only very recently, while I’ve been at home with Chloe, that I’ve learned just how badly I was let down by the police. Maybe I mean betrayed.
Because it turns out they actually knew about one of my attackers in the very early days of my abuse.
They knew because three weeks before I was bundled into a police van and questioned about smashing the Balti House counter, this particular round, thickset man had been seen in a takeaway in Rusholme, home to Manchester’s so-called Curry Mile.